


Amateur Cartography

by Eustace (Sibylline)



Series: Fever Dreams [2]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Angst, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Multi, Non-Monogamy, Self-Esteem Issues, Substance Abuse, more angst.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 05:28:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9420647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sibylline/pseuds/Eustace
Summary: Companion piece to "Even In Our Sleep"; Quentin has nightmares, and is as terrible at warding his mind in his sleep as he is while he's awake. Penny finds this distracting, or at least he tells himself that's the reason that he keeps popping into Quentin's dreams; it's just so that Penny can get some goddamned sleep. It's certainly not because they're friends, because Penny has a policy against having friends that has been instituted following multiple catastrophic incidents (see here: moth-man, the entire history of adolescence).Penny is still a dick. Magic still does not come from sunshine and ice cream.





	

He dreams of the hospital, again and again, the same as it was and worse. The hospital band, thin white plastic, a shackle to reality: he’s not a magician, he’s a sack of chemical imbalances.

He has a very good memory (he’s _Ivy League material_ after all) and Dr. London’s words echo against white walls: _On admitting, you reported you couldn't concentrate, eat, get out of bed. You said the feeling of not belonging anywhere was overwhelming. And that you were the most useless person who ever lived._ In his dreams, it turns out that he didn’t get it,  couldn’t grow up and let it go. Now he’s found a place where he belongs, and it’s a psych ward, and now– even now he can’t stop running away. He was right about one thing, though. He is the most useless person who ever lived.

The problem is that it’s a more convincing story, all things considered: white walls and dim corridors and brightly-colored pills that vanish by sleight of hand and rattle in his pockets. Makes more sense than Brakebills, eternal summer and magic; being out of his mind makes more sense than being _chosen._ The Beast– at least that’s illogical, a man with dusty moths instead of a face, too many fingers below those starched white cuffs; more illogical still that the Beast would come for him, searching for a specimen of stunning mediocrity. There’s an argument to make against that, dreaming or waking.

Waking, he can fight off that nasty little voice, shrink it down until it’s nothing but the drone of a mosquito on the other side of a screen. He can wash away the sweat and change the sheets and let daylight burn off the haze of the nightmares.

Waking, he has Eliot, and Margo and Alice, to remind him that he’s not _alone_ when he slips backwards and forgets it, to help him remember that they’re all damaged, that it’s a necessary consequence of life and not a personal failure. That he has people who care about him, people who are worth caring about, who he would walk through hell for and will help him if he just _lets_ them. He still feels like he’s got this hole struck through the middle of him, aching and empty, a space he can’t put words to—whether it’s something that should have been filled that he’s lost, or whether it’s a hole ripped in the seams, a space that wasn't meant to be.  Some days are better than others.

He carries on.

He fights.

 

Dreaming, it’s still a different story. He’s in four-point restraints, given up on casting spells one-handed, fingertips going numb from fighting. He’s started counting the holes in the ceiling tiles, counting the dead flies in the florescent lights.

“I never thought I’d say this, but I really prefer the nerd sex dreams to this shit.” Quentin cranes his neck to see Penny standing at the foot of the bed, arms crossed, looking skeptical.

“Thank god,” he breathes, fervently, “A little help here?” and wiggles the hand that’s strapped above his head.

“It’s your dream, man, you can let yourself out.” He tilts his head a little. “Not that it’s necessarily a bad look for you.” His stomach bottoms out. _Fuck. Penny’s going to leave him here, like this, because it’s funny, haha hilarious._ Not that it’s anything less than what he deserves, _fucking useless._ He shuts his eyes and sucks in a shuddery breath.

“Oh _christ,_ ” Penny’s voice is tight under the implied eye-roll, like he’s realized it’s not a joke any more. “Abacadabra,” he says, tapping each ankle and wrist in turn, and the restraints vanish.

“Thank you,” Quentin mumbles, rubbing at his wrists.

“You dream so _loudly._ Let’s get the fuck out of here.” Quentin stares at the locked door. “It’s your dream, the door goes where you make it go. If you take us to Fillory, I’ll beat the shit out of you in real life, I swear to god.” Quentin lurches out of the bed, puts his hand on the doorknob and shoves hard. There’s sunshine on the other side, and he grabs Penny’s arm and pulls him through behind him. 

They’re in Central Park, and Penny’s pulling his arm loose like Quentin’s burned him, hurt him. “No touching,” he says, and he actually sounds pissed; Quentin jams his hands into his hoodie pockets, chews on his lower lip instead of saying, _I’m sorry_ or _I didn’t want to leave you in that place,_ or _I don't know how these doors work and I didn’t want to leave you behind._ They both look around.

 

There are no people, just the two of them, but the carriage horses still clomp, without their reins or bridles or blinders, chewing at the green, green grass, nibbling at shrubs and flower beds. In the distance, there are dogs unleashed trotting, rolling in the grass, pissing on trees without ceasing to wag their tails. _Ugh._ Quentin thinks, _Thanks for the metaphor, subconscious._

 

One of the dogs wanders over, golden retriever, flops itself down on Penny’s feet and stares up at him, all perked ears and tail swishing through the grass like a metronome. Penny stares down at him for a few long seconds, while the tail swishes faster and the dog lolls out his tongue in a doggy smile. Then Penny drops a hand to scratch behind its ears, running his fingers through silky fur as the dog closes his eyes in pure joy.

“Your dream-dog likes me better,” Penny says, smugly, but Quentin still saw the way he smiled down at the dog, with his eyes and not just a quirk of the mouth.

 

They’re by the Pond, and they wander toward the water.

 

“If you’re going to ask me where the ducks go in the winter, they go south. They go south to Florida and shit on everything there.” Quentin blinks, and Penny glares at him. “Yeah, I read _Catcher in the Rye,_ asshole. I even read Shakespeare. Don’t look so shocked.”

“Oh, Jesus, am I Holden Caulfield in this scenario? I’d rather be Indiana Jones.”

“Of course you would. Now get us some crackers, I want to feed these stupid ducks.” Quentin’s about to protest, _where am I supposed to get crackers,_ when he feels something in his hoodie pocket, pulls out a squashed sleeve of saltines.

 _Finally, a practical use for magic,_ he thinks, and tosses them to Penny.

Quentin sits on a bench and watches Penny throwing crackers to (at?) the ducks, apparently delighted when they squabble or when he manages to ping a bit of cracker directly into a duck’s beak. There’s a slackening of tension in the way he moves, like he’s put his hackles down. If Quentin didn't know better, he’d say that Penny's having fun, but he knows better and he doesn't say anything at all. 

When the crackers are gone, Penny dusts his hands and saunters over to where Quentin is sitting.

“I think we’re done here. Wake up.”

“What—” whatever he was going to say is cut off, as Penny repeats,

“Wake the fuck up!” and slaps him across the face.

 

Quentin jerks awake in his own bed, pale morning light washing over the walls; he checks his wrists and finds them bare, sighs in relief and stumbles up to brush his teeth. Eliot has made coffee, because Eliot is a saint in a brocade dressing gown, and the kitchen feels like a Folgers commercial with a hallucinogen sheen.

“I had such weird dreams last night,” he sighs.

Eliot leans in closer to look deeply into his eyes and slide over a plate of toast. “Was it the one where you find out that you were meant to be the king of the unicorns, but you’ve been disqualified because you’re not a virgin? Because I have that one all the time, and I think it’s very discriminatory.” Quentin giggles into his coffee.

“Shit, their loss. You’d make the _best_ king of the unicorns.” Eliot looks flattered, despite his best efforts. “I mean, it started with the hospital dream, those are getting a little better, I think, but then Penny was there?”   

“Was it a sex dream?” Eliot looks thoughtful “I can see the bad-boy punk-rock appeal.” And that would probably be more normal than the dream he actually had, if he’s being honest with himself. Dreams are weird, people are naked and animals are smoking cigarettes.

“No, I opened a door and we were in, like a version of Central Park. He fed the ducks and made a _Catcher in the Rye_ joke,  apparently I’m Holden Caulfield and the dogs in my dreams like him better than they like me.” Margo strolls in behind him and steals a slice of Eliot’s toast.

“Margo, how do we feel about Penny?”

“Mm, nice biceps, like the tattoos. Kind of an ass. Quentin, marmalade, really?” And Quentin had indoctrinated himself into liking marmalade at the age of seven, because that’s what they ate for breakfast in the Chatwin household, because that way he could escape into _Fillory_ even at the breakfast table during his parents’ conversations (arguments) about the correct way to arrange dishes in the dishwasher (which were never really about bowls in the top rack, but a stand-in for something else that he didn’t understand, something that made the air too heavy to bear).

“If it’s good enough for Jane Chatwin, it’s good enough for you. If you really hated it, you wouldn’t be talking with your mouth full.”

“Oh, fine, I take it back.” She sips at her coffee. “Probably a defense mechanism, be an ass, pretend caring about things is beneath you, tell yourself it’ll keep you from getting hurt. I’m still talking about Penny, not about you, Eliot.”

“Definitely not talking about yourself,” Quentin mutters.  

“You’re getting more insightful, Quentin, it worries me.”

Through all their lectures Quentin’s eyes keep drifting toward Penny, until Penny boxes him in by the broom closet, demands,“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing! I mean.” This is going to be awkward, but that’s par for the course, and Quentin forges on. “Okay, I had a dream last night, and, uh, you were in it? And I wondered whether you, um, Travelled in, or if you didn’t. In which case this conversation is about to get even more awkward than it already is?”

“And your method for finding this out was, what, _staring_ at me all day? You really need to work on your communication skills, man.” And okay, Penny’s got a point, but also there’s a certain irony in that, coming from Penny, who only speaks sarcasm, who is comfortable with physical contact only in the forms that result in orgasm or bruises and bloodied knuckles. This conversation is still not going to set any records in awkwardness for Quentin, because his issue is not that he’s unable to read people, it’s that somewhere between his brain and his mouth all the thoughts and words tangle into a ten-car pileup while he watches in slow, resigned horror and the conversation skids to a halt. He’s got a high bar and he’s getting used to stumbling around in the wreckage.  

“Is that a yes, or—?” Penny makes a disgusted noise, and Quentin wonders what that’s covering up.

“Keep staring at me, and I’ll slap you in real life, too.” It’s hard to tell from his tone whether that’s a threat or a promise or an advertisement of what’s generously on offer.

 _I guess that’s a yes, then,_ Quentin thinks. 

It keeps happening; usually it’s just bleak corridors and locked ward doors. Quentin still can’t get free on his own; it takes Penny to remind him, and suddenly he finds keys in his pockets or the door to a fire escape. Rarely, Penny follows him through the doors, like the first night. More often, he tells Quentin to wake up, shoves him awake when he fails to do so, or exits through other doors.

Penny's still a dick, in the waking world.  Quentin prefers it, really; he would find it too destabilizing, if that were to change. Penny’s dickishness a north star, a constant amidst all the chaos. It’s the sort of dickishness where, if you’re passing on the same narrow path, he won’t step out of the way; it’s not about you on the other side, not about power, not about making you yield, it’s more like at some point in his life he decided that he’d rather have the bruised shoulders and scraped up knees from getting knocked aside and knocked down than ever give way again.

He still stares too much, Penny smirks when he catches him looking. But that’s the thing. Penny’s seen what’s behind his eyes, what’s inside his head, and he doesn’t recoil. He’s seen the fucked-up, ugly parts of Quentin, and despite all he’s seen, he doesn’t stop looking back.

 

** 

Almost everything in him says, _don't get too close don’t get used to it._ Make yourself hard to hold so they can’t get close and don’t want to anyway, so you’re never tempted to let them in, because you don’t always trust yourself to say _no._ Don’t make friends, and certainly don’t fall in love, because sooner or later you’ll hurt them or they’ll hurt you, and then you’ll both be alone stumbling around with your guts in your hands. Skip the middle, cause you’ll end up alone either way, and this way you get to keep your blood on the inside of your body.

The rest of him says to put as much as he can in his pockets; it’s a buffet that he wasn’t meant to be at, but they looked the wrong way at the front door, or left the door open by the dumpster, and now he’s in. Just a matter of time before they figure out he doesn’t belong, and he’ll have to run, but he’ll fill his stomach and his pockets in the meantime, get while the getting’s good.

Penny keeps stumbling into Quentin’s dreams, keeps on watching him in idle moment, and he knows he should stop. Knows he needs to stop. But he doesn’t want to. Quentin moves like he wants to crawl out of his own skin, gets the Mountain Goats stuck in his head, and Penny’s not sure whether that’s better or worse than Taylor Swift but it’s something different and probably more appropriate. The way he tucks in his shoulders, like he’s walking into the wind, bracing against some unseen force, awaiting an inevitable blow. Quentin shows every emotion on his face, it doesn’t take a psychic to read him, and it makes Penny’s skin itch.

Penny has the unfortunate inkling that Quentin’s flavor of fucked-up isn’t that different from his own, that Penny’s just buried it deeper while Quentin hasn’t bothered to bury it at all. And it’s like all of Quentin’s messy feeling are calling out to Penny’s, and they’re working their way up from where they’ve been dormant, burrowing for the surface like little parasitic worms.

The thing is. The thing is, he likes it here. It doesn’t quite feel like he belongs, but he doesn’t not-belong. Like it’s a kind of shelter and he can’t trust it. And he’s going to lose it, sooner or later, everything he’s ever loved. It’s dangerous enough to _want_ , more dangerous to let himself _have._ The only thing he has absolute faith in is that this is going to fall apart sooner or later.

_(“Your poker face is terrible,” he tells Quentin, in the midst of some dream. “You’re going to get taken for all you have.”_

_“Who says we’re playing poker?” Quentin asks. “Maybe we’re playing Rounders and we’re on the same team.”_  

_That’s a laugh._

_Everyone knows it's a zero-sum game.)_

***

Kady notices.

How could she not?

“S’up with you and Quentin?” He rolls his eyes and she adds, “if you say, _nothing,_ so help me god—”

“He has fucked up dreams, like echoes of that shitshow with the hedgebitches. And they're _loud._ I pop in and smack him out of it, sometimes, so I can get some fucking sleep.”

“And?”

“And _nothing._ ”

“And hanging around in his head totally has no effect on you, which is why you keep staring at him. It’s definitely not weirdly intimate to wander through somebody’s dreams, especially because he has to be letting you in, at least subconsciously, and you’re absolutely not freaked out by it, not even a little. Right?” She props herself up one one elbow and her hair ghosts against his bicep. “ Unless the issue is that you’ve been having dream-sex, in which case my only objection would be that you haven’t told me about it. In _detail._ ” He groans.

“No! God.” Casual sex would probably give Quentin a nervous breakdown, and in the meantime the Beast would come back and eat our livers and eyeballs. “Other than the psych hospital, they’re normal dreams. Nice.”

“Shit. That’s what’s freaking you out.” She sighs, like she’s found the crux; if she has, she’s found it before he has. “Nice.” She pillows her head on his chest, so they can look at the ceiling instead of at each other,. “People like you and me, we don’t get _nice_ things for free, unless we steal them. Otherwise we’re looking for the catch.”

“It just feels like…” and it’s difficult to put words to it. Feels like when he was riding his bike as a kid, past dark, he could close his eyes, let himself be swallowed up for a moment in the hush, the rush of air drowning out the crickets, cool air on his skin, moving too fast for the mosquitoes to touch, as if he were suspended between worlds for just a moment, as if he’d somehow escaped his bonds. But you can’t keep your eyes closed for long, or you’re asking for a hard fall. “Like there aren’t any consequences. And then we wake up, and I realize that if I keep doing this, he’s going to start thinking we’re _friends_ or some shit.”

“That would be _terrible_ ,” she says solemnly, but there’s laughter lurking behind her voice.

He shifts so he can press his lips to her shoulders, neck, until she turns to catch his mouth with hers; can’t say that this enough, to be entwined with her and inching closer, that it’s enough to terrify him. That she makes him think about more than just getting through the day, makes him think about what could be and not just what is, that he’s already shaken by what he wants and how deeply he wants it, when he knows how dangerous wanting can be. He tangles his hands through her dark curls instead, kisses the delicate skin between her breasts, over her sternum, over her heart, instead of saying that he thinks he might be falling for her, that if this is falling in love it feels like being in a car crash, uselessly white-knuckling the wheel and slamming the the brake while the forces of physics carry him onwards. He can't find the words and wouldn’t use them if he could, he just lets the adrenaline ride through him, tongues in each other's mouths as if to taste all the words that they’ve alreadyswallowed, their teeth on collarbones and hips, hands on every inch of each other’s skins as if they were meant to be cartographers, mapping every pulse point and tender place of their small world. They fall asleep exhausted, skin marked with every place they’ve staked a claim.

***

There’s a party at the Cottage, Quentin’s broken his rule about the drinks Eliot makes and is off-kilter with a drink in his hand that tastes like a make-out with a Christmas tree, pine and something deep and earthy; Eliot had said something about lichen vodka, which, is that even a thing? The music is too loud, the pulse of the bass settling in the base of his skull, and everyone is too close, or too far away. When he’d started at Brakebills, he’d somehow had the idea that he’d be less socially awkward, less sad, than that magic was not just real but that it would fix everything. Well, magic is real, and he’s working on the sadness, but that’s not magic, and there’s no spell he’s found that can do shit about his social skills.

At the end of his senior year, he’d received an evaluation from one of his seminars that read, Quentin _is a sensitive and intelligent student. But he is painfully shy, quiet and makes poor eye contact with faculty and other students._ He’d gotten an A in the course; thankfully he was far better at writing thesis papers than he was at social interaction. Julia had been furious on his behalf, told him to talk to the faculty, which made him wonder if she’d ever really _looked_ at him; he didn’t argue with their assessment because he _couldn’t_ , because it was deeply true. He might be at Brakebills, and magic might be real, but he’s still _himself._ There’s no epiphany, no flash of light, this isn’t a feature film, it’s a long slow slog uphill, and he’s starting to think that happiness isn’t in that treasure chest over the hill, it’s something that creeps up slowly while you’re pouring the mud out of your boots. That’s not happening tonight, though.

He wanders toward the kitchen because refreshing the snacks is always a useful excuse to briefly escape.

Penny’s there, slouched against the counter, eyes closed and head tilted back while one of the nature kids sucks a hickey into his collarbone, and Quentin’s brain blows a fuse because _what the fuck_ , because Penny's clearly _gone_ over Kady, why and how could Penny cheat on that, also also since when is Penny even into guys?

Kady slinks through the other door, smokey eyes and the click of leather boots, and Quentin flinches, waiting for something to explode. Instead she cants her hips against Penny’s side, pulls him in by the scarf and kisses him hard while the blonde Natural kid is still glued to his neck like a lamprey. Penny’s eyes are open now, dark and glittering and burning right through Quentin; Kady swivels and smirks at him.

“Don’t be a prude, Quentin. You gonna to stand there and watch or are you gonna join us?”

Quentin's trying to form words, his lips moving and nothing coming out. He’s not a boy, he’s a stunned bird who is sliding down a window that wasn’t supposed to be there at all, just another twist that he never saw coming, lying there on the metaphorical sidewalk hoping not to be eaten by anything while he remembers how to breathe and the way his bones are meant to fit together. He’s trying not to focus on how red and wet their mouths are, how Kady’s lip gloss is smeared along Penny’s bottom lip, he’s wishing for a red solo cup to hide behind when the Natural kid chimes in with the slow profundity of the truly stoned, “Sexuality is fluid, man, and monogamy is a construct of the patriarchy,” and Quentin bolts from the room as his skin burns and the light bulb above him flares and blows out.

***

It must be the tenth or twelfth time, he’s huddled on the couch in the hospital again, staring into space and tugging at the hospital band until it chafes his wrist raw, wondering _dream-or-not-dream_ and his wrist twinges a little, which goes into the _hurts-so-probably-real-life_ column. Penny crouches in front of Quentin, asks, “Do we need to have a safe word? Not that I don’t _enjoy_ slapping you awake, but there are non-contact ways of breaking the dream.”

“Um. What.”

“For instance,” Penny says, and snaps his fingers, “Abracadabra.”

 

Quentin wakes up in his room at Brakebills, the clock glowing 5:04 am and the sky just starting to lighten through the windowpane, wrist reddened by his own fingernails but blessedly bare. He buries his head under his pillow. He doesn’t sleep, gives up on barricading out the morning light, spends an hour drinking cup after cup of coffee and pacing the kitchen, acid and caffeine and low-grade anxiety thrumming under his skin until it’s time to go to class.

***

It’s after Stanley’s visit, advertising the glories of astral-projection-only, says, _you’ll be like a ghost_ , like he’s selling a positive, like Penny doesn’t know how that feels already. After Stanley tells him to fuck off, and Penny has the sudden, horrifying realization that this is what he’ll end up as, an old, bitter man at a bar who has one leg and a heart that’s mostly atrophied from disuse. He’s amputated more than his leg, trying to stay alive, and he’s still _afraid_.

He’s sitting in the common room of the physical kids’ cottage, because they do throw the best parties, at least if you measure that in terms of free liquor, and he needs something to take the edge off, or _edges,_ plural. Like a bottle of vodka or a belt sander. 

He’s one drink in and he’s still got that sick sense of foreboding, like he’s at a crossroads, has to pick a side, so he has another drink. The feeling doesn't go away. _Two roads diverged in a yellow wood_ but the trick is that both the roads are the same, if you read the fucking poem, and he wonders if he can burn the whole forest down instead. He has another drink.

He's three drinks in, and he’s abandoning the road metaphor, he thinks he’s built some nice walls for himself, but he forgot to build a door. He thinks he can still get out but he’s going to have to crawl through some broken windows to get there.

He slinks out to the terrace to smoke a joint, just taken the first drag when he sees Quentin sitting, staring off into the dark trees. He holds in the smoke, pokes a psychic finger out toward Quentin’s mind. It’s not warded, precisely, doesn’t have the teflon-slick feel of classical wards or the hazy spiderweb feel of his usual half-baked ones; more like static and barbed wire. Quentin must feel something (well, that’s new) because he swivels to look at Penny.

“You okay?” Quentin asks. Penny blows out a long cloud of smoke, leans against the brickwork wall next to where Quentin’s sitting, looks out at whatever Quentin’s looking, but it’s just more shadow and more fucking trees.

“Yeah. I’m fine.” Quentin asked it like he meant it, like it wasn’t just a gesture or a pleasantry, but Penny still clips off the words, a reflex, more brittle than he had intended.

“You’re fine. Yeah, me too.” His voice is dark, sounds like he’s half-talking to himself. “I ripped the roof off a building by summoning a miniature hurricane, but I’m _fine_ . You’re drunk, getting high, and even _I_ can tell that something’s bothering you. But hey, I’m glad we’re both fine.” Quentin sits motionless, so still that it’s actually disturbing.

Penny doesn’t want to have this conversation right now, or frankly ever. He also doesn’t want to be alone, and he doesn’t want to go back into the house, and he especially doesn’t want to end up like Stanley.

The silence lingers and Quentin gives in first, his shoulders bending inwards and hair falling across his face as he bows his head toward his knees. “Sorry. Shit. Just ignore me, tell me to fuck off. Let’s keep pretending we’re both fine, pretend that you’re not in pain.”

“What makes you think I’m in _pain_ , Coldwater?” And he’s got the contempt down just right in the tone, but he’s shown his hand in some way, retreating to Quentin’s surname, like it’s a wedge that can push them apart when they’ve already seen each other.

“Everyone’s in some kind of pain,” and there’s bitter huff of a laugh tacked to the end of it, says it like, the sky is blue, like it’s a simple statement of fact. Actually, based on the time that Penny’s spent in other people’s heads, Quentin’s right. Though Penny can’t figure out if this conversation is some act of radical honesty, bravery, or if it’s some kind of self-destruction, like the truth is a chisel and he’s taking everything apart.

“Look, do you want me to get one of your friends to come out and talk to you? Because I don’t think you’ve picked the right man for the job here.”

“Are you saying that we’re not friends?” 

“Look, we’ve been through some shit, and I guess that makes us something, but friends? The best friend you had growing up turned into a hedgebitch, locked you in your own head, and left you for dead. My best friend growing up was a voice in my head who turned out to be the Moth-Man who _also_ tried to kill us. So excuse me if I’m not really sold on the idea.”

“I don’t know about the Beast, but I wouldn’t have made it through high school alive without Julia. So yeah, I trusted her, showed her my weak spots and handed her a knife, but–” he hesitates, and oh, she _hurt_ him, didn’t she. “I’d still do it all over again if I had the choice.” He honestly sounds like he believes it. “And we’re friends. You’ve been in my head, could take me apart if you wanted to. I haven’t been in yours, but I can tell that you _do_ give a shit, and you try to hide it. I don’t understand myself, and I don’t understand you. But lonely and hurting, yeah, I understand that.” Quentin’s voice is raw but steady, fumbling less at his words than usual. Penny thinks there's a possibility that Quentin is stone-cold sober right now, and that makes one of them.   

“Fuck you,” he says reflexively, but doesn’t move. Quentin takes the joint from his hand, he takes a drag, passes it back. When he breathes again, he says,

“You’re allowed to want things.” Penny feels the drinks in his stomach twist uneasily.

“What the _fuck_ is that supposed to mean?”

“Oh. I have no idea. Eliot said that to me and it seemed profound at the time.”

Quentin doesn’t say anything, and the silence stretches out and out into the darkness, too much empty space. “I don’t hate you,” Penny finally says, and it’s like a confession, easier in the dark. What would Stanley do? What’s the opposite? You can't define yourself against something or someone forever, but it’s a fucking start.

“Growing up–well, let’s say the Florida panhandle’s not exactly a mecca of diversity and acceptance. Then I started hearing voices when I was sixteen. At Brakebills they call that psychic, everywhere else they call that crazy.” He doesn’t add that Quentin’s dream was not the first time he’s seen the inside of a locked psych ward, a consequence of reading the mind of a cop who was hassling him for loitering; turns out antipsychotics don’t work when the voices aren’t just in your head, but other sorts of drugs do. “I come to Brakebills, cool, just one freak among many, it’s an improvement in my life. And then I meet my mentor, Stanley, and he’s just a fucking _vision_ of Christmas Future, in which Option A is die in a volcano because I can’t control my discipline. Option B is a nice little tattoo to tether your meat-sack to earth, astral-projection only, which keeps you alive long enough to give yourself alcohol-induced hepatitis.”

“What’s option C?”

“There _is_ no option C, according to Stanley.”

“Stanley sounds like he gave up on life a few decades ago and subsequently became an asshole. Just because he hasn’t found a way, doesn’t mean there isn't one. Shit, you’re _better_ than that, Penny.”

He appreciates Quentin’s optimism, but he doesn’t know if he believes it. His gifts have scared the shit out of him from day one; accidentally slipping into other people’s heads was an unwelcome talent, but Travelling, a skill he can barely control, feels like he’s at the controls of an airplane that’s losing altitude, ground rising to meet him as he flips unlabelled control switches and looks for a manual. The drinks and the stillness and Quentin’s eyes on him, like he can see the shadows flickering behind all of Penny’s wards, conspire to leave him teetering on the edge of telling some version of the truth.

But his lips are still closed when a first year comes stumbling barely past the door to vomit across the paving stones, the splash and stench of bile shattering the silence. Penny bolts first, snags a bottle of whiskey on his way out the front door, pauses just long enough to see Alice’s blue eyes on him, and figures that at least she’s sober enough to pick up the pieces of whatever happened on the patio.

***

The third time Quentin is in isolation and four-point restraints, Penny sits on the end of the bed, watching him. Quentin stares at the ceiling tiles. There’s a fly battering itself to death against the tube of the fluorescent light. Maybe the fly is a metaphor.

“Is this, like a _thing_ for you? You need somebody to shove you into walls and slap you across the face so you can get out of your own head? I mean, is there a reason I keep showing up to this particular scene?” He runs a finger along the cuff around Quentin’s ankle, where it meets the thin skin over the Achilles tendon. He doesn’t actually even sound contemptuous about it, just. Curious? Quentin wants to bury his face in his hands, but his hands are strapped down, so he keeps staring at the ceiling and feels the blood creep into his cheeks.

“I don’t know. It’s my subconscious. Fucked up neurotransmitters. A heavy-handed metaphor for my entire life, trying to run away and ending up more trapped than ever. Crippling social anxiety and an inability to ask for anything I want.” He wants to ask, is this a _thing_ for Penny, no touching unless he’s fighting or fucking, but Penny’s not the one strapped to a gurney, so instead he mumbles, “Dunno why you keep showing up, though.”

“Because we’re friends.” Penny says _friends_ as though it sits unfamiliar on his tongue, he’s measuring the word’s weight, finding the taste both sweet and bitter.

Penny walks slowly along the bed, trailing his hand along Quentin’s body as he moves, as if he’s Hellen Keller, deaf and blind, saying something with the press of his hands that he can’t shape into any language he knows. Shinbone, kneecap, thigh, over the thin cotton of the hospital-issue pants, Quentin bucks up a little, involuntarily, at the fingernails brushing his hipbone where the elastic waistband slid down, the span of skin where his shirt has rucked up over his stomach, tries to just breathe when Penny’s fingertips come to rest in the hollow of the suprasternal notch. Pretty sure Penny can feel his pulse hammering there, because it’s like breaking waves in his ear drums. The communique in that touch is not _water,_  might be _friend_ but it’s more than that.

“What do you want, Quentin Coldwater?” Penny asks, like it's costing him something to make the words. Part of him says, _not in this place_ and the rest of him says _now now now now NOW._

“ _Everything,”_ Quentin breathes, surges up to catch Penny by the collar, fit their mouths together, and it’s messy at first, all sharpness and hunger and teeth and tongue, before Quentin lets Penny take control, and it feels like fear and desire, and he’s gasping with one hand knotted in Penny’s collar and the other buried in his short hair before he realizes that, hey, _his hands are free_. He turns his head and everything is still white, walls and furniture, but also in that strange simultaneity of dreams, is that first room they shared at Brakebills, illuminated by the watery golden light of dawn filtering through frosted glass.

Penny has a fistful of Quentin’s hair, tugs a little as he says, “Nice work, Houdini,” and Quentin gasps into the side of his neck. He fits his hand to the nape of Penny’s neck, gentles, traces the line of his jaw, and Penny flinches like he’s been punched, breathing ragged like he likes it, eyes wide like there’s more to fear in tenderness than violence and maybe he’s right.  Penny scrapes his teeth across Quentin’s collarbone, pushes him down to the mattress and kisses him hard, and Quentin tilts his head back and bares his throat. The bed’s narrow, but Penny is straddling him; he fumbles at his shirt with unsteady hands until Penny works it over his head, pins one wrist to the mattress above his head; there’s no real force behind it but Quentin still moans a little. “You good?” Penny asks, his irises gold in the light, pupils blown wide, flush in his cheekbones. “Good, just don’t stop touching me,” Quentin says, his tongue is heavy in his mouth like he’s been drinking the syrup of poppies, still shapes the word, “ _Please,”_ and it comes out as a demand and not a plea. He runs his hand down Penny’s stomach just to feel the muscles work under his skin as he bucks his hips up and against him, right before he gets to work on Penny’s pants.

Quentin wakes up in the dark, the clock blinking 5am and the solid weight of another person dipping the mattress beside him. Penny looks at him through half-lidded eyes. “Traveller. It happens sometimes,” it's a verbal shrug, explains why he ends up in the Cottage at breakfast with Kady sometimes when no one can remember him coming in the night before. “Quit thinking so loud, you’re ruining the afterglow,” he mumbles, yanks up the coverlet and presses a little closer to Quentin, bare skin on skin, before plummeting back into sleep. Quentin follows suit; he can overthink this in the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> IDEK, this is longer than it was meant to be and kinda messy. It was going to be another chapter of Even in Our Sleep but I decided it should be separate because reasons. 
> 
> I feel kinda awkward (& squicky) about writing a relationship where people act like jerks to each other in real life and then still have sex, because that is not a healthy relationship, but I tried to imply (with questionable success) that it's more in the vein of Margo and Eliot being occasionally savage to one another but still caring deeply about one another in a mutually understood way. 
> 
> Title from Aside by The Weakerthans
> 
> (I'm unconsoled, I'm lonely, I am so much better than I used to be/  
> And I'm leaning on this broken fence/ Between past and present tense/  
> And I'm losing all those stupid games/ That I swore I'd never play, but it almost feels okay  
> Circumnavigate this body of wonder and uncertainty/ Armed with every precious failure and amateur cartography)
> 
> *Quentin's class evaluation is an evaluation I actually received at one point: I felt that it should be immortalized in prose because it's too beautiful not to share.


End file.
